New from Cambridge University Press!

Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Book Information

This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituentstructure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety offunctionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependencygrammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-drivenPhrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditionaltests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrasestructure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, andset theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear,thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural propertiesof constituent trees.

Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure.Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived fromrelational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency ormultiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multipledimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituentstructure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well asimportant theoretical differences among the various approaches toconstituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations ofcompeting frameworks.

This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapterand ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide toconstituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well astheoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics,cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.